Sunday, January 30, 2011

The Big Divide

I think most gamers believe that developers of original games always create games that they want to make. This isn’t true.

For me, Dementium: The Ward was certainly a case of us creating a game just for us. But, after that, Moon came along. Moon was an opportunity that arose from discussions with Mastiff, who wanted to work with Renegade Kid on a FPS for the DS. I dug into my bag of ideas and resurrected the essence of an old sci-fi game concept for the Gameboy Color and pitched the basic idea in FPS format, and then we got started into development. Getting the game signed was a ridiculously quick and easy process. This is not typical. Now, I’m not saying that Moon was a game that I did not want to make, but it wasn’t born of pure game-making desire. It was a business deal that afforded us the opportunity to cobble together some ideas in an effort to convince a publisher to pay us to develop an original game.

There was no publisher input with Dementium: The Ward. It was literally made just for the pure sake of making a game. Moon, on the other hand, had a publisher involved from day one. Those of you who have played both games will hopefully agree that both Dementium: The Ward and Moon are pretty much of equal value, with some people favoring one over the other as a matter of taste, which is a pretty amazing result, and a testament to the publisher’s / developer’s tolerance of each other.

Dementium II was also born from a business opportunity. SouthPeak purchased Gamecock, who published Dementium: The Ward, and as part of their new acquisition decided to act upon one of Gamecock's successful titles. Dementium II was a lot closer to my heart than Moon because it was a sequel to the pure-born Dementium: The Ward. And, with a HUGE thank you to SouthPeak’s David Dienstbeir, John Kaiser, and Aubrey Norris, the developer/publisher relationship on Dementium II was a smooth as warm butter. They let us make our game, and supported it in any way they could. It couldn’t have been any better. I really enjoyed working with those fine folks on D2.

ATV Wild Ride was a semi-pure-born concept. We’d wanted to develop an arcade racing game for the DS for a long time, and found ourselves with no development deals on the table after Dementium II was completed (even though I'd been in talks with dozens of publishers for over 6 months), so we decided to start making an ATV racing game – called ATV Spirit at the time. The ATV direction was directly influenced by the awesome title, Pure. We also decided to go with ATV because that theme of racing has sold fairly well on the DS, and we wanted to develop a racing game that players and publishers would be interested in. I know ATV racing is not really on the top of the list of hardcore gamers, but it is a genre that appeals to a lot of casual players, and perhaps with a little Renegade Kid magic we can turn a few hardcore players into believers. We’ll see…

So, anyway, my point is that we don’t always get to make our heart’s desire. Personally, I have wanted to make a 2D platform game for many years. I’d also like to develop a 3D platform game, hence the Maximilian demo we made. It can be argued that if a developer simply goes ahead and creates a game that they’re passionate about, it will find a home with players. But, what stands in-between the developer and the players are publishers. If publishers don’t think they can make money from your game, they won’t be interested in it. It can be a risky market out there, and publishers are even more careful with their investments than ever before.

Now, one of the main reasons that publishers must be so careful with their money is because the retail industry controls what games are put on the shelves. This includes Gamestop, Target, Walmart, Best Buy, etc. Publishers must convince each retail outlet to place an order for their game(s). Each retailer obviously wants to make as much money as possible, so they want titles that they think will sell. Are they experts on what will sell? Um, no, they really aren’t. But, they are in control of what product goes on their shelves, because they own those shelves. So, if a publisher goes to each of the big retailers with a single DS game and tries to place it with them, they’re going to have a hard time with an original title with an unknown brand that is only on the DS. If this title also has a Wii version, suddenly the deal looks better to retail. It feels like a more established brand and perhaps the publisher is going to put more marketing into a two SKU title. Now, if it has 360 and PS3 versions too, well, now we’re talking! How can we make this deal even more appetizing to retail? Huh, OK, how about we dump the artsy fartsy original content and replace it with a known brand, such as a movie or TV show? Yeah, now that’s money! Now, we have a game that has a built-in audience from the license, and it has multi-platforms. How can we lose? Oh? The game is shit? Never mind, it’ll sell anyway. :) Sure, I know that was a little sassy, but it is unfortunately very true.

This brings me neatly to one of the many things that is changing the video-game industry: digital content. The ability to cut-out retail is a beautiful thing. If we – and when I say we; I mean developers and publishers working together in a balanced partnership – if we can focus on making games that do not need to be engineered to impress retail for shelf space, but instead are able to focus on a game for game’s sake and invent creative ways for marketing our games to players, the number of high quality titles will surely increase. On top of that, not having to spend / risk money on manufacturing cartridges or DVDs is also a huge benefit that helps steer the focus of game making back onto the game and not all of the abstract and unnecessary obstacles that stand in our way today.

I see the road to a brighter day being paved today. We'll be there before you know it!

5 comments:

I had a feeling that most developers would freely make their own titles, but of course you proved how untrue it was.

I figured how licensed games tend to have pre-generated hype, and most times, they do manage to... well, most licensed games just suck. There are good ones, mind you.

(Bless WayForward for some good licensed games.)

Moon did feel like a clash of ideas for a concept, with your Game Boy Color sci-fi game concept and the publisher's wishes for an FPS. Good game nonetheless, though I only had a slight problem with an apparent bug.

Pretty great read overall, it's definitely something I would like to keep in my mind.

Thanks Jools that was very interested. I'm a business man and a gamer so I have always been interested in the business side of gaming.

I'm still ticked that my local superstore which is the only place to buy games without having to drive 45 minutes still does not stock Goldeneye Wii. I can't believe it really. The game is going to be a million seller pretty soon and the store has loads of games that sold way worse then that but for some reason they've never bothered to stock it. I have found your games to be difficult to find too so I've just bought them all online instead of trying to pick them up locally.

Cutting out retail is incredibly dangerous though. Gamers prefer owning their games. When that right gets taken away from them, they aren't too happy about it.

We've been pretty receptive of downloadable titles when the value proposition is just right. $10 for a new Contra title on my Wii? Sounds good. But there's a tradeoff. I can't take a downloadable title to friend's house. I can't let him it borrow it. I can't rent the game to give it a try first.

But, by all means try digital games if you think it matches your business model better. If you can, say, produce an excellent off-road racer for WiiWare (hint, hint - try a Baja-style game), I'll buy it.

Paying attention to what the market wants is incredibly important. Why make games to please yourself if you know they won't sell, right? You'll go bankrupt doing that. Also, what consumers want is never, ever wrong. If they are willing to pay for something, they're in the right. If one person won't produce that product for these paying customers, someone else will.

However, not everyone knows whether a game will be successful. Hopefully, you have some sort of gut feeling that it will, but ultimately, some times you just don't know. Did you know that Nintendo of America's focus test groups completely rejected Super Mario Bros.? It's true. The most popular phrase uttered by kids in the test group was "this is shit!"

Who could have guessed before the game was released that it would become one of the most important and best-selling games of all time?

Former NOA president Minoru Arakawa couldn't get retailers to stock the NES in 1985. He had to beg them to do it, and he had to offer the most ridiculously gracious terms possible. But within a few years' time, the terms had completely flipped, and Arakawa dominated retailers with an iron fist. Retail agreements usually reserved for toys (which were highly favorable to retailers, horrible for toy manufacturers) were completely bypassed. Arakawa could literally wipe a retailer out by cutting off their NES supplies and killing their sales.

The point is that if you put out a great product that people want, it won't matter what retailers originally thought. They'll have to start stocking it.

Notch has sold, what, a million copies of Minecraft so far? And what advertising did he use? None. The game isn't even finished. Word of mouth sold the game.

Anyway, I'm still waiting for a better ATV Wild Ride gameplay trailer. I'd like to see the game in action. That one trailer you've released so far only has short bursts of gameplay in between the cartoon segments.

As a PC/DS gamer I'm very split on the one hand I have no problem with my huge Steam account and I don't like to buy retail games anymore infact the few I do usually are locked to steam and the box gets thrown away. For the DS on the other hand I really do prefer the box. I'm all for the freedom digital delivered content offers and I'm sure in time things will change towards a digital only machines but the PSPgo proved that time isn't here yet.

In my mind retail is basically a dead process that kills originality. Sure it may lead to more sales but really only more sales of the most popular games. Retail has the ability to artificially cause hype and sales around mediocre games while some highly original games will be given one box on a shelf full of Call of Duties and Gears of War etc XBL is a good example of this unfortunate system carrying over to digital. Steam is a great example of how games that had no chance before now sell thousands of copies perhaps even millions.

It's an interesting time indeed and I for one am firmly on the side of retails death hell if it was practical I'd even cut the publishers out of the equation.